A new poll finds that most English-speaking Quebecers don’t trust the CAQ government to address community concerns.
Only eight per cent of English speakers who participated in a recent Leger Marketing poll said they trust the Quebec government to ensure that English-language services are provided to the public.
The majority of English-speaking respondents, 78 per cent, said they have greater faith in their community organizations to provide services in their mother tongue. When it comes to education, 81 per cent of people said they trust English-language school boards, according to the five community groups that commissioned the survey,
The Quebec Community Groups Network is publicizing these sentiments, as English-language community leaders engage in a heated battle with the CAQ government over the future of their school boards.
“These results demonstrate very clearly that English-speaking Quebecers feel Premier François Legault and his party do not understand English-speaking Quebecers and are not committed to defending our rights and institutions,” says Quebec Community Groups Network president Geoffrey Chambers.
Of those who said they mistrust the Quebec government, 20 per cent cite a lack of support for the community as the main reason.
Other areas of concern include difficulty obtaining health care services in English, as well as getting service in English from stores and businesses.
As he toured the new campus of Universite de Montreal today, Premier Francois Legault was asked to respond to the English-speakers' apprehensions. Legault said the government's "top priorities are education...create well paid jobs, make sure we have efficient services in health care. So I'll continue to explain that these are my priorities and it's good for the Anglophones."
The online Leger Marketing study was conducted between Aug. 29 and Sept. 4, 2019, for the Quebec Community Groups Network, the Community Economic Development and Employability Corporation, the Quebec English School Boards Association and the Association for Canadian Studies. The poll sampled 1,019 Quebecers with English as their first language, 773 Quebecers with French as their first language and 144 persons whose first language is neither English nor French. The survey has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
